The heart of a solar electric system is the solar panel itself. The PV market is expanding rapidly, and manufacturers are constantly introducing new and emerging technologies. The end result of all these technologies is the same: You place the solar panels in the sun, and they produce power. The more powerful the sun’s energy, the more power you get, although solar panels continue to generate small amounts of electricity
Generally, stand-alone (off-grid) and smaller grid fallback PV systems run at low voltages, typically between 12 and 48 volts. This is because batteries are low-voltage units and so building a stand-alone system at a low voltage is a simple, flexible and safe approach. Grid-tie PV systems tend to be larger installations, often generating several kilowatts of electricity each hour. As the electricity is required as a high-voltage supply, it is
Grid-tie is now hugely popular in Europe, North America, China and Australia. This is due to the availability of grants to reduce the installation costs, the ability to earn money through feed-in tariffs and the opportunity to sell electricity back into the electricity companies. In a grid-tie system, your home runs on solar power during the day. Any surplus energy that you produce is then fed into the grid. In
Until around 15 years ago, off-grid/stand-alone solar photovoltaic installations were the most popular type of solar installation. Solar photovoltaics were originally created for this very purpose, providing power at a location where there is no other source of power. Whether it is powering a shed light, providing power for a pocket calculator, powering a completely off-grid home, or providing electricity to an entire village, off-grid/stand-alone systems fundamentally all work in
Previous Next When we are designing systems, we generally want to keep the currents as low as possible. If we put too much current through a circuit, the energy loss caused by this current increases exponentially. This current creates heat and reduces the overall efficiency of the system. This resistance builds up over distance, which means that the higher the current, the more issues you will have with power loss,
We are not using an inverter with our holiday home, but many solar applications do require an inverter to switch up the voltage to grid-level AC current.An inverter for stand-alone systems is a different piece of equipment to a grid-tie solar inverter. With a grid-tie inverter, your power is feeding into the grid and must work in conjunction with the grid. The inverter connects directly to your solar panels and
The solar controller looks after the batteries and stops them either being overcharged by the solar array or over-discharged by the devices running off the batteries. Many solar controllers also include an LCD status screen so you can check the current battery charge and see how much power the solar array is generating. More expensive solar controllers may have the option of a WiFi or Bluetooth link and an app
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